Moderate job growth – more than 10,000 new jobs, mostly in the blue-collar sector – will arrive this year, leading to a gradual recovery for the Inland Empire, said regional economist John Husing at the Ontario Convention Center on Wednesday.

“It’s not wild job creation but positive boost we’ll be seeing in the economy,” said Husing, who studies the Inland Empire.

His cautious optimism was detailed in his annual Inland Empire Economic Report Card, a forecast that many in the business community will scrutinize for months to come.

Of the 10,500 jobs that Husing predicts will be created, more than 80 percent will be blue-collar jobs in the logistics and manufacturing sectors.

There will be slight growth in white-collar and health care jobs but construction employment will continue its downward trend, said Husing.

One indicator that 2010 is poised for a turnaround, Husing said, is the empty store shelves that greeted shoppers at the close of the holiday season.

“Empty shelves are always what we see when the economy turns,” Husing said.

After two consecutive years of plummeting job numbers, Husing’s prediction of slight growth – 0.9 percent – indicates that the economy is crawling in the right direction.

In 2008 and 2009, about 1.1 million jobs in California were slashed, taking the state back to the 2000 level.

“We’ve lost every job that was created in this decade,” Husing said.

In the Inland Empire, more than 140,000 were lost in the last two years, putting the region back to the 2004 level. That means that all the job gains created during the region’s boom years has been lost, he said.

With the region’s unemployment rate at 14.7 percent, Husing said there is only one other area in the nation where the jobless rate is higher – Detroit.

“That is not a list I would like this area be on for a lengthy period of time,” Husing said.

He blamed policy-makers for not focusing attention on job creation.

“We need a shift in government consensus in the state of California on the issue of doing something about the economy,” Husing said. “No matter what your political persuasion, the fact is this state has not paid an awful lot of attention to job creation.”